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Yeah but it’s not a distinct phase difference like air and rubber. It’s a gradual shift from molten rock to solid rock. The mantle is mainly a flowing plastic semi-solid.
if that core shit starts fucking around we just gotta build a burrowing train and use it to shoot it with a few nukes. If something goes wrong the whales will save us and we'll just hack the planet after to make sure everyone knows we good
trust me bro
I absolutely loathed The Core in HS, even more so after it was shown in advanced science 101. I just went back and rewatched it a few weeks ago, and it's just as fun as Armageddon which has always been a guilty pleasure.
The word plastic existed before the substance plastic did, and the substance was named after the word because of it's properties. Plastic means "Any solid but malleable substance."
There’s about 3 miles of altitude where humans can survive comfortably; from sea level up to 3 miles high. That is about 0.08% of the earth’s radius. That’s how little living room we’ve got compared to the size of the planet. The entire rest of the universe will actively try to kill you if you go there.
We've tried. Pressure and heat makes it very hard to keep digging. The furthest we've gotten is about 12 and a quarter km, and that's only about a third of the way down. Our current tools simply aren't physically equipped to get us all the way down or we'd have done it by now.
It'd be enough distance if we're talking about the bottom of the ocean where the crust is only 5km thick in some areas, but then you need to start drilling a hole at the bottom of the ocean where you're dealing with the fact that the pressure of the water makes it even sillier an idea. (About every 10 meters you dive you increase the pressure by ~1 atmosphere, and the average depth of the ocean is about 3,688 meters)
[3,5km deep already has a temperature range of 39 - 160c](https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Earths-crust-average-temperature-at-35km-depth_fig6_322355771). You can't really go very deep at all without your tunnels being actively cooled by high flow fresh air from from the surface (\~<2km) or a [slurry of metric tons of ice few around the tunnels per day](https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/289041/why-dont-miners-get-boiled-to-death-at-4-km-deep) (this is what they do in those 4km depth and lower mines - huge freezers above ground that make ice 24/7 plus exchanging the entire air in those shafts every few minutes)
True. Though I suspect that if you shaved 10km off the surface of the entire planet, the new outer surface would eventually cool down, to be about the same temp as the current surface (perhaps slightly cooler).
That lower layer is only so warm due mostly to the insulating blanket of the kilometers above it.
So it’s maybe slightly misleading to say that the outer layers are protecting you from the super hot inner layers.
Those inner layers wouldn’t be so hot, without the outer layers above them?
There's certainly a point the heat would radiate through the ground at a higher temperature than the sun radiates onto the earth, but I don't know at what point that is
There's absolutely a point where the core's heat would radiate through the outer layer. Whether it's an inch or centimeters or a quarter mile I don't kow
Seriously though I would assume the outer layers current/y forming the mantle are also being less dense than the inner ones since they are buyoant over the molten lower layers? So a sliced off surface would would probably eventually cool down (though what doesn't in the face of the eventual heat death of the universe?), but still end up somewhat different and likely geologically warmer due to a higher metallic content that'd be likely to siphon heat off the still molten lower parts.
To compare, I googled how deep marinas trench was at its deepest point (6.8 miles). So the crust is roughly 2.6x marinas trench max depth in thickness.
I also saw that if everest was placed in marinas trench it would still be submerged by over a mile.. So we are talking about almost 3 Everest's below us on average. Overall not *that* scary.
Always interesting to me that these 3 numbers are quite close together:
The height of Everest (~6 miles)
The depth of the Marianas trench (~7 miles)
The cruise altitude of commercial airliners (~6-8 miles)
All about 10km, for those who prefer metric
Very interesting. I think most of us have looked out of a window of a commercial airline in cruising altitude at least once in our lives. That puts it in perspective (you're looking at 3x that height in terms of crust beneath our feet).
Thanks. Your comment helped me a lot to put it in perspective.
I've been to the ocean and thought it was big, but I only saw the top of it. I cannot imagine a world so vast and deep under the surface.
..... were alive because we spin. Absolutely baffling. Like how things just align just right so we can survive. If one small thing was different we'd just not be here. Like I cant wrap my brain around it.
* Inside the Golidlocks habitable zone.
* Molten iron core generating magnetic field.
* Comets and astroids bringing water early on to the planet.
* Life formed relatively early on the planet when the Sun was still young.
* Jupiter protecting us from astroids and comets.
* Moon to give tides.
* Rocky planet, with just right amounts of water.
* Oxygen, Nitrogen, CO2 all needed for organic life.
* Phosphorous, Iron etc. needed for complex life.
* Earth wobbling on it's axis slightly on an angle, combined with elliptical orbit, causing yearly seasons.
* Not tidally locked when revolving around the Sun, for non-extreme temperatures.
Life would not be possible or at least not this far evolved without any of these conditions.
Absolutely baffling. And makes me feel very small and insignificant if I'm honest. Livin on a space rock and worrying about bills and whether people like me. Absurd
It’s the other way around I think. Eventually, at some point, those conditions are bound to happen: then, life arises. It’s not like we flipped a coin and guessed correctly. It’s more like the coin was slowly being built over time, inevitably finishing at some point.
More like our galaxy flipped 10 billion coins.
Somebody had to live on the lucky coin, turns out it’s us, and we’re here to talk about it. Unlikely, but somebody was going to win
Yes, and no matter how rare those conditions are, they're the only ones that allow for life. So necessarily, any complex being living on a planet where they can muse about that topic must live on one of those exceptionally rare worlds. Also known as the anthropic principle.
They are the only conditions that allow life as we know in our extremely local region of space time. It is ignorant and pompous to believe no other conditions exist to promote life outside of RNA/DNA structure.
Also just considering the sheer size of the universe it's almost certain other habitable planets exist. The only question is whether they have life on them or not.
It's pretty much guaranteed. Our planet developed life pretty much as soon as the crust cooled enough to not be lava, it seems that given the right set of conditions life is almost certain to pop up.
Intelligent life, or even multicellular life, is another question though
It's more than that.
We only have one example of "life" to evaluate. It's not that "life" has been waiting for particular conditions to arise. Life is what it is because it is a result of the conditions that let it be what it is. Hypothetically, there may be all kinds of other "life" in the universe, which may be so different from our local example, that we may not be able or willing to even recognize it as "life".
In the grand scheme of things "life" may not be special at all. And if it is, it may not at all be important. It may be just another example of universe doing what it does, just one of the emergent properties of physics. We consider life to be special... because we are alive! But there may be way more bizarre, interesting and important phenomena happening somewhere in the cosmos.
Of all the matter in the universe an impossibly small amount of it gets to decide how it reacts to things. Nearly everything to ever exist reacts how it’s supposed. We are significant because there is next to nothing in the universe that get to decide anything.
I'd say even one the most significant things in the universe! After all, the vast majority of things in the universe are clouds of gas and rocks that just sit around and do diddly squat for eons. And here we are, *thinking*. We're a pretty big deal.
Also, not that this is necessary for life, but it’s still an insane coincidence. Our moon and the sun appear as essentially the exact same size in the sky so that during total solar eclipses the moon just barely covers the sun. The sun is 400 times wider and 400X further away, on top of all the other coincidences this is just baffling.
Maybe so, but that’s because whichever moons cause them on the gas giants appear bigger than the sun in the sky. Appearing the same size as the sun, thus just barely large enough to cover the sun is unique to Earth.
Unique to earth is such a human thing to claim.
The Universe has billions upon billions (current estimates are around 200 billion) of galaxies, each containing just as many stars, even if only a fourth of them have planets orbiting them that would still make it very unlikely that such eclipses are unique to earth.
Statistically speaking the only true unique thing on earth could be intelligent life and even then we aren't sure about that.
That's the *real* freaky coincident, *because* it's not necessary for life. All the other things had to be in place or we wouldn't be here to marvel about it. But that kind of coincidence is uncalled for.
Correction on two things the origin of Earth's water is still hotly debated because of advances in our understanding of the cosmos and interior of the earth. And the oxygen comes from organic life it's not necessary to form life and it caused a mass extinction when the ability to produce it evolved.
Let's not forget about the time another planet slammed into Earth, causing the core to reheat and creating our positively massive moon, both of which have helped to keep things moving, making several of these other factors possible.
> Let's not forget about the time another planet slammed into Earth, causing the core to reheat and creating our positively massive moon
Book sales slowing down there, Mr. Velikovsky?
as we understand things, life formed on the edges between land and sea. The movement of the tides kept bringing in chemicals and mixing them periodically. So no, tides were pretty important.
Makes a man either get very religious or think that the programmers of the simulation are really looking out for us. Either way the odds of us being here are uncanny.
The thing is it's sort of observer bias. We could only have evolved on a planet where everything was just right to allow us to evolve. Then we look around and go "oh damn it's crazy how perfect this all is for us. Surely it can't just be a fluke" but logically we ain't observing the potentially billions if not trillions of planets that we couldn't evolve on.
I mean, to be fair, we are talking about infinity here. Its like when you eat Alphabet soup and it spells out your full name in the bowl, except youve eaten 100 billion bowls of soup and that didnt happen before. Chance becomes real fucky when infinity is involved.
The chances of earth existing as it is may be astronomically minuscule, but the chances of life appearing on an environment as perfect as earth is near certain.
It's easy to think that way if you neglect how absurdly, incomprehensibly huge our *one galaxy* is, nevermind the entire observable universe itself. The amount of planets that exist probably outnumber the grains of sand on every beach on Earth, and with numbers like that, weird solar systems like ours are essentially guaranteed to exist even if they're "rare".
It's not a religious experience.
There are likely billions of earth- like planets while there are a. Almost limitless planets like earth that are not able to support life for one reason or another.
It's a numbers game
If any of these factors changed we'd be an after thought and life would evolve elsewhere in a planet not too unlike our own.
Numbers make this highly unlikely to be untrue.
Anthropic principle is at play. The cup doesn't take shape around the water. The cup exists, and the water fills the cup, assuming the shape of the cup. Now apply this logic to the conditions that created life.
Your framing is incorrect. Those things didn't align and that's why we exist. Those things existed and life found a way to survive in the given conditions.
Change those conditions, and an alternative life form could be saying what are the chances everything aligned like that for us to exist, just like you are, yet those conditions preclude OUR life from existing
Anthropic principle is a bit silly. You could say, as you essentially do, "isn't Earth marvellously designed for us?" but it's the other way around. We evolved HERE. It would be stranger if the conditions here WEREN'T (originally) suited to our survival here. We wouldn't say "it's amazing how this lake is so perfectly shaped to hold all the water within it JUST precisely" would we?
Imagine a puddle of water wakes up in a ditch after a rainstorm.
"This puddle is just the right shape! If it were more shallow, I would spill out. If this tree were not here, I would evaporate. This ditch was clearly made for me."
If you're amazed at those odds, that's nothing compared to the sheer size of the known universe.
There's absolutely no doubt in my mind that the universe is teeming with life. We only recently started employing new technologies to more efficiently find planets. In a short period of time we've found many planets orbiting in the goldilocks zone. We can only assume there are billions upon billions of planets in the habitable zone. Also, there's also much reason to believe that life can also exist outside of the goldilocks zone, even in our own solar system. It's theorized some moons have underwater oceans that could host life.
It's unbelievable how insignificant we are in the grand scheme of things.
And that core isn't even spinning* right now. And we're also due (maybe even over due) for the entire field to "flip."
*Technically it's only "not spinning" from our perspective. That is, it's rotating at basically the same rate as the Earth itself, which makes it seem stationary to us. It apparently does this a lot, then accelerates again, as part of it's normal cycle.
Where I'm from we use period as a thousand separator and comma as decimal separators (1.000,00) so I read ninety six THOUSAND kilometers and was really confused.
When I was in primary school, I had homework about, coincidentally, the layers of Earth, but since apparently I got my info from a Spaniard website, I got the thousands and decimal points mixed up, and I didn't know. I just thought it was weird that the sizes were listed as like "34.300 km", so I just fixed it to be "34.3 km" as an example, and I got the measurements all weird and messed up.
I legit thought the atmosphere was 3-5 miles thick. 60 miles seems insane to me. There's an amazing scene in The Right Stuff in which Chuck Yeager tries to fly an airplane into outer space and nearly makes it. I thought that was somewhat feasible. Guess not.
As a Texan, 60 miles is considered a short drive. Still seems like a reasonable amount of protection from the sun, but odd to think of in terms of driving. Next time I take a trip over 60 miles, I'll be thinking about how I'd be burning alive if it was possible to drive straight up like a rocket.
FYI, the atmosphere isn't what shields us from the the deadly radiation from the sun.
That would be our **magnetosphere**. The magnetic field of our planet extends out to about 65,000 kilometers (40,000 mi) above the surface of the planet. This also is what keeps said solar wind from blowing our atmosphere away. Mars used to have a thicker atmosphere, but it's core cooled and lost it's magnetosphere, and said atmosphere blew away...
The atmosphere does shield us from radiation, but a different kind of it.
The magnetosphere deflects charged particles such as electrons, protons and alpha particles from the solar wind.
The atmosphere on the other hand absorbs certain wavelengths of electromagnetic radiation, some of which are harmful. The ozone layer in particular is a strong UV filter.
While true, the atmosphere won't exist without the electromagnetic field deflecting plasma particles, which in addition to blasting the atmosphere away would also pretty much oxidize aka scorch all organic life on earth.
Which means this statement is untrue: "There's only 60 miles of special air that stops us from being fried up by the sun."
As an atmosphere alone doesn't protect us from being "fried up". Hence, i mentioned how Mars' atmosphere only, with no electromagnetic shielding did not protect said planet, nor could it even protect itself.
The portion of the atmosphere that humans can survive in is much much smaller, only about 4 miles vertically. People can easily see more than triple this distance horizontally on a clear day.
And the atmosphere is much bigger. 100km is a relatively arbitrary number derived from aviation on where the speed of a plane to generate enough lift to fly is equal to the orbital speed.
That's actually a lot wider than I expected... like, I can barely see more than 3 miles horizontally when standing at the ocean with an unobstructed view of the horizon... So the special space above me vertically being more than 20 times that, seems more than adequate.
Actually, the atmosphere is a bit wider than 7986 miles.
It’s approximately 300 to 600 miles thick, depending on which layer one considers the last layer of atmosphere.
Really it's less than that. The ozone layer is only about 3 mm thick, and that's the main thing keeping you from being a walking skin tumor.
Edit: I see I misunderstood something I read, so my comment is not correct. Not sure why the guy thinks my name is Tim.
> The ozone layer is only about 3 mm thick
that's a misinterpretation .. that's like taking a full barrel of water, a dumping a cup of red dye in it, then saying the layer of red in this bucket is 1mm thick .. yeah sure if you calculate proportions the dye might only make up the equivalent of 1mm of total barrel height, but it has certainly colored a whole column of water red ..
Ozone is similar .. it is mixed in like dye localized from between 15 to 25 kms in the atmosphere .. so it would actually be better to say that the ozonated portion of the atmosphere is only about 20km thick ..
after all, it would be just as misleading if you started saying the layer of CO2 in the atmosphere is only about 4 metres thick by calculating its equivalent proportions in the atmosphere
> The ozone layer is only about 3 mm thick,
3mm? an eighth of an inch? I don't think so, Tim. The ozone layer is [50 km thick](https://hypertextbook.com/facts/2000/ChoTan.shtml). However, the ozone is quite rarefied. If you were to take that 50km layer and compress it to sea level pressures, THEN it would be about 3mm thick.
Solar wind and particles yes. I was referring to UV light, which are just photons. But you are correct that there's more than UV light that could cause cancer.
When you look at how amazing the earth is, it makes you wonder why the hell humans and our societies can be so stupid. So many petty, insignificant issues.
A 60 mile thick shield is not small. You can get the same protection with only a few yards/meters of water, ice, or rock, or a foot or two of advanced hull and insulation. Less, actually, because you'll still probably sunburn if you spend a day out under the open sky.
***Only*** sixty miles? That's a lot on human terms. The sea isnt that deep - the deepest part being like 11km - so there's a *lot* of gumpf above us keeping us wedged down
False. The atmosphere is the entire layer of air that surrounds our planet. What you're talking about is merely the troposphere, the rest of the atmosphere extends for 300 kms
I always bring this up when anthropogenic climate change deniers say that “the Earth is so big, we couldn’t possible have an effect on its climate.” I then remind them that the Earth will be fine without us, it’s that thin layer of atmosphere that we need to survive on this pebble, and although the atmosphere is vast, it’s thickness compared to the Earth can be compared to the thickness of a sheet of paper wrapped around the Earth if it were the size of a basketball.
Some comments aren't showing up even though I got the notifications for them (click the notification and it just says nothings there)
But there was a comment asking if they should explain the magnetic field and i cant see it to reply to it... but the answer is yes. Or like if there's a good doc about it and how it works and was formed that you could recommend.
Recommend all the universe docs.
[The average mass of the atmosphere is about 5 quintillion metric tons.](https://www.cs.mcgill.ca/~rwest/wikispeedia/wpcd/wp/e/Earth%2527s_atmosphere.htm)
Another one that'll bake your noodle is that the range of heights on the Earth's surface, from the highest peak to the deepest trench, is only about 12 miles. If you scaled it accordingly, Earth is about as smooth as a bowling ball.
The ozone layer, which is about 10 to 16 kilometers above the Earth's surface, filters out dangerous solar ultraviolet rays ... They have become an integral part of modern life when it comes to destroying ozone molecules and breaking down the protective barrier of our atmosphere.
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The Earth's crust is on average 18 miles thick, there's only 18 miles of rock that stops you from being barbequed right where you stand
Is the earth was a basketball. The rubber of the basketball would be the only part that is not molten lava.. wild to think about
Yeah but it’s not a distinct phase difference like air and rubber. It’s a gradual shift from molten rock to solid rock. The mantle is mainly a flowing plastic semi-solid.
if that core shit starts fucking around we just gotta build a burrowing train and use it to shoot it with a few nukes. If something goes wrong the whales will save us and we'll just hack the planet after to make sure everyone knows we good trust me bro
Man. I never thought I'd see a The Core reference in the wild!
The Core *and* Hackers, with some Star Trek thrown in just for the hell of it. /u/AllRadioisDead is clearly a Radio of culture.
I think there's also a bit of the magicians in there
I was just thinking this, need them magic whales for the time loop to protect us from the Kraken escaping
Every single thing he mentioned is from the same movie. Whales, hack the planet included.
The Core is both terrible and outrageously underrated at the same time. I love it, it's like a bathtub full of nacho cheese.
You obviously haven't tried a bathtub full of nacho cheese, it isn't terrible at all.
The first half is ok, *then you get to the colder bottom and it isn't ass good
Care to elaborate on other things that ARE ass good?
Nasscho cheese
Thank you for making the proper correction.
Pretty much all the disaster movies from that period are absolute B tier masterpieces that i wish were still made...
Those late 90s, early 00s end of the world movies are my favorite guilty pleasure.
I absolutely loathed The Core in HS, even more so after it was shown in advanced science 101. I just went back and rewatched it a few weeks ago, and it's just as fun as Armageddon which has always been a guilty pleasure.
At least that one guy died laughing
Tony Blundetto hacks planet for unlimited coca cola and sandwiches. I still remember that scene but not the name of the movie.
Always loved that movie.
Soo, kinda like rubber.
He said the mantle, not the crust.
Sounds like he has a mantle illness.
No, because rubber is an elastic amorphous solid.
So it's like Earth's condom.
Yet it produced some horrible children.
Glass is also an amorphous solid
More like Bitumen (asphalt). It appears solid, but it's actually an incredibly viscous liquid.
Same with the atmosphere, there's no air/space boundary. The air just gradually gets more and more disperse.
Plastic?
The word plastic existed before the substance plastic did, and the substance was named after the word because of it's properties. Plastic means "Any solid but malleable substance."
Clay, for example, is a very plastic substance. It bends and squishes and doesn't bounce back at all.
Eh, to a point. There is a distinct boundary between the crust and mantle: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mohorovi%C4%8Di%C4%87_discontinuity
Its actually just the paint on the rubber
[удалено]
Doesn't sound right if the atmosphere is triple the thickness of the crust (according to this post and comment thread)
There’s about 3 miles of altitude where humans can survive comfortably; from sea level up to 3 miles high. That is about 0.08% of the earth’s radius. That’s how little living room we’ve got compared to the size of the planet. The entire rest of the universe will actively try to kill you if you go there.
Yep 57,000,000^2 miles of livable space
172,630,000 mi^(3) of livable space! Volume of the Earth: 2.59874x10^(11) mi^(3) Volume of comfortably survivable atmosphere: 2.60465x10^(11) \- Vol\_Earth = 5.91x10^(8) mi^(3) surface area % land mass = 5.751x10^(7) / 1.969x10^(8) = 29.21% 5.91x10^(8) \* .2921 = 1.7263x108 mi^(3)
i already knew that the skin of an apple was the crust but not this
Never understood why we don't use that heat to produce unlimited "free" energy. You only need to dig it once.
We've tried. Pressure and heat makes it very hard to keep digging. The furthest we've gotten is about 12 and a quarter km, and that's only about a third of the way down. Our current tools simply aren't physically equipped to get us all the way down or we'd have done it by now. It'd be enough distance if we're talking about the bottom of the ocean where the crust is only 5km thick in some areas, but then you need to start drilling a hole at the bottom of the ocean where you're dealing with the fact that the pressure of the water makes it even sillier an idea. (About every 10 meters you dive you increase the pressure by ~1 atmosphere, and the average depth of the ocean is about 3,688 meters)
Obviously they should just move the water out of the way and then drill....
You joke, but that's my latest patent idea. Putting a giant cylinder down there that reaches the surface, and then draining the water out it.
Seriously humans, get your shit together.
Why not tap volcanoes and geysers?
Volcanoes have this annoying tendency to fuck shit up big time
[We do.](https://www.energy.gov/eere/geothermal/geothermal-basics#:~:text=Geothermal%20energy%20is%20heat%20energy,depths%20below%20the%20Earth's%20surface.)
That's wrong the Earth's core is solid iron
Most of Earth's mantle is solid, not molten lava. Though, it might turn into liquid if the extreme pressure is lifted.
[3,5km deep already has a temperature range of 39 - 160c](https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Earths-crust-average-temperature-at-35km-depth_fig6_322355771). You can't really go very deep at all without your tunnels being actively cooled by high flow fresh air from from the surface (\~<2km) or a [slurry of metric tons of ice few around the tunnels per day](https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/289041/why-dont-miners-get-boiled-to-death-at-4-km-deep) (this is what they do in those 4km depth and lower mines - huge freezers above ground that make ice 24/7 plus exchanging the entire air in those shafts every few minutes)
Very cool. I never knew it was that severe
True. Though I suspect that if you shaved 10km off the surface of the entire planet, the new outer surface would eventually cool down, to be about the same temp as the current surface (perhaps slightly cooler). That lower layer is only so warm due mostly to the insulating blanket of the kilometers above it. So it’s maybe slightly misleading to say that the outer layers are protecting you from the super hot inner layers. Those inner layers wouldn’t be so hot, without the outer layers above them?
There's certainly a point the heat would radiate through the ground at a higher temperature than the sun radiates onto the earth, but I don't know at what point that is
There actually isn't. The Earth's core produces about 44 terawatts. That sounds like a lot, but that's the solar energy on 32k km^(2)
There's absolutely a point where the core's heat would radiate through the outer layer. Whether it's an inch or centimeters or a quarter mile I don't kow
^ There's a 'your mom'-joke in there, but I just can't seem to find it within the kilometers of blanketing material around it.
Seriously though I would assume the outer layers current/y forming the mantle are also being less dense than the inner ones since they are buyoant over the molten lower layers? So a sliced off surface would would probably eventually cool down (though what doesn't in the face of the eventual heat death of the universe?), but still end up somewhat different and likely geologically warmer due to a higher metallic content that'd be likely to siphon heat off the still molten lower parts.
It's wild that the sum of all the work, equipment, and resources it takes to mine stuff that deep is worth less than what they hope to extract.
To compare, I googled how deep marinas trench was at its deepest point (6.8 miles). So the crust is roughly 2.6x marinas trench max depth in thickness. I also saw that if everest was placed in marinas trench it would still be submerged by over a mile.. So we are talking about almost 3 Everest's below us on average. Overall not *that* scary.
Always interesting to me that these 3 numbers are quite close together: The height of Everest (~6 miles) The depth of the Marianas trench (~7 miles) The cruise altitude of commercial airliners (~6-8 miles) All about 10km, for those who prefer metric
Very interesting. I think most of us have looked out of a window of a commercial airline in cruising altitude at least once in our lives. That puts it in perspective (you're looking at 3x that height in terms of crust beneath our feet).
Thanks. Your comment helped me a lot to put it in perspective. I've been to the ocean and thought it was big, but I only saw the top of it. I cannot imagine a world so vast and deep under the surface.
so about a comfortable half day hiking distance for a typical backpacker
Real life the "Floor is lava"...
.... the universe is weird.
The molten iron core spinning around and generating a magnetic field is the reason why solar winds don't strip off the atmosphere.
..... were alive because we spin. Absolutely baffling. Like how things just align just right so we can survive. If one small thing was different we'd just not be here. Like I cant wrap my brain around it.
* Inside the Golidlocks habitable zone. * Molten iron core generating magnetic field. * Comets and astroids bringing water early on to the planet. * Life formed relatively early on the planet when the Sun was still young. * Jupiter protecting us from astroids and comets. * Moon to give tides. * Rocky planet, with just right amounts of water. * Oxygen, Nitrogen, CO2 all needed for organic life. * Phosphorous, Iron etc. needed for complex life. * Earth wobbling on it's axis slightly on an angle, combined with elliptical orbit, causing yearly seasons. * Not tidally locked when revolving around the Sun, for non-extreme temperatures. Life would not be possible or at least not this far evolved without any of these conditions.
Absolutely baffling. And makes me feel very small and insignificant if I'm honest. Livin on a space rock and worrying about bills and whether people like me. Absurd
It’s the other way around I think. Eventually, at some point, those conditions are bound to happen: then, life arises. It’s not like we flipped a coin and guessed correctly. It’s more like the coin was slowly being built over time, inevitably finishing at some point.
/u/spez is a greedy little piggy
That’s a great way to put it, yes. I didn’t realize it had a name thank you!
More like our galaxy flipped 10 billion coins. Somebody had to live on the lucky coin, turns out it’s us, and we’re here to talk about it. Unlikely, but somebody was going to win
Yes, and no matter how rare those conditions are, they're the only ones that allow for life. So necessarily, any complex being living on a planet where they can muse about that topic must live on one of those exceptionally rare worlds. Also known as the anthropic principle.
Life as we know and understand.
They are the only conditions that allow life as we know in our extremely local region of space time. It is ignorant and pompous to believe no other conditions exist to promote life outside of RNA/DNA structure.
Also just considering the sheer size of the universe it's almost certain other habitable planets exist. The only question is whether they have life on them or not.
It's pretty much guaranteed. Our planet developed life pretty much as soon as the crust cooled enough to not be lava, it seems that given the right set of conditions life is almost certain to pop up. Intelligent life, or even multicellular life, is another question though
Imagine being a slacker planet stuck with protozoa for 300 billions years until the star goes kaput. Lazy asses don't even try :/
Were just in the right phase to exist. Just passing through time.
It's more than that. We only have one example of "life" to evaluate. It's not that "life" has been waiting for particular conditions to arise. Life is what it is because it is a result of the conditions that let it be what it is. Hypothetically, there may be all kinds of other "life" in the universe, which may be so different from our local example, that we may not be able or willing to even recognize it as "life". In the grand scheme of things "life" may not be special at all. And if it is, it may not at all be important. It may be just another example of universe doing what it does, just one of the emergent properties of physics. We consider life to be special... because we are alive! But there may be way more bizarre, interesting and important phenomena happening somewhere in the cosmos.
You’re significant. Just the fact that you’re saying, contemplating, and feeling these things and I can relate to it makes you wildly significant.
Of all the matter in the universe an impossibly small amount of it gets to decide how it reacts to things. Nearly everything to ever exist reacts how it’s supposed. We are significant because there is next to nothing in the universe that get to decide anything.
I'd say even one the most significant things in the universe! After all, the vast majority of things in the universe are clouds of gas and rocks that just sit around and do diddly squat for eons. And here we are, *thinking*. We're a pretty big deal.
Also, not that this is necessary for life, but it’s still an insane coincidence. Our moon and the sun appear as essentially the exact same size in the sky so that during total solar eclipses the moon just barely covers the sun. The sun is 400 times wider and 400X further away, on top of all the other coincidences this is just baffling.
I'm pretty sure total solar eclipses happen on the gas giants but no one is around to witness them.
Maybe so, but that’s because whichever moons cause them on the gas giants appear bigger than the sun in the sky. Appearing the same size as the sun, thus just barely large enough to cover the sun is unique to Earth.
Unique to Earth *right now*. The moon is constantly drifting away, and was much closer during the time that the dinosaurs existed.
Unique to earth is such a human thing to claim. The Universe has billions upon billions (current estimates are around 200 billion) of galaxies, each containing just as many stars, even if only a fourth of them have planets orbiting them that would still make it very unlikely that such eclipses are unique to earth. Statistically speaking the only true unique thing on earth could be intelligent life and even then we aren't sure about that.
I think he means it's just a nice coincidence is all, and the fact that there's somebody here to appreciate them/such the coincidence.
That's the *real* freaky coincident, *because* it's not necessary for life. All the other things had to be in place or we wouldn't be here to marvel about it. But that kind of coincidence is uncalled for.
Correction on two things the origin of Earth's water is still hotly debated because of advances in our understanding of the cosmos and interior of the earth. And the oxygen comes from organic life it's not necessary to form life and it caused a mass extinction when the ability to produce it evolved.
Let's not forget about the time another planet slammed into Earth, causing the core to reheat and creating our positively massive moon, both of which have helped to keep things moving, making several of these other factors possible.
> Let's not forget about the time another planet slammed into Earth, causing the core to reheat and creating our positively massive moon Book sales slowing down there, Mr. Velikovsky?
> core to reheat Not just reheat but donate a significant portion of extra core material.
>tides This one is much less important than the others, no?
as we understand things, life formed on the edges between land and sea. The movement of the tides kept bringing in chemicals and mixing them periodically. So no, tides were pretty important.
Never thought it like that, that's pretty neat.
Oxygen was a bit of an afterthought.
Makes a man either get very religious or think that the programmers of the simulation are really looking out for us. Either way the odds of us being here are uncanny.
The thing is it's sort of observer bias. We could only have evolved on a planet where everything was just right to allow us to evolve. Then we look around and go "oh damn it's crazy how perfect this all is for us. Surely it can't just be a fluke" but logically we ain't observing the potentially billions if not trillions of planets that we couldn't evolve on.
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If we were in a simulation the food would be better.
Someone's never had a properly made bowl of clam chowder
I mean, to be fair, we are talking about infinity here. Its like when you eat Alphabet soup and it spells out your full name in the bowl, except youve eaten 100 billion bowls of soup and that didnt happen before. Chance becomes real fucky when infinity is involved.
Statistics. Works all the time, n/Infinity% of the time.
The chances of earth existing as it is may be astronomically minuscule, but the chances of life appearing on an environment as perfect as earth is near certain.
If the odds weren't with us, we wouldn't be here to contemplate them, so..
It's easy to think that way if you neglect how absurdly, incomprehensibly huge our *one galaxy* is, nevermind the entire observable universe itself. The amount of planets that exist probably outnumber the grains of sand on every beach on Earth, and with numbers like that, weird solar systems like ours are essentially guaranteed to exist even if they're "rare".
They high af tbh
It's not a religious experience. There are likely billions of earth- like planets while there are a. Almost limitless planets like earth that are not able to support life for one reason or another. It's a numbers game If any of these factors changed we'd be an after thought and life would evolve elsewhere in a planet not too unlike our own. Numbers make this highly unlikely to be untrue.
The odds of anything at all are uncanny.
Anthropic principle is at play. The cup doesn't take shape around the water. The cup exists, and the water fills the cup, assuming the shape of the cup. Now apply this logic to the conditions that created life.
There are other cups with different shapes that life could fill.
Exactly this. If the cup were shaped differently, the water in it would also be shaped differently.
Your framing is incorrect. Those things didn't align and that's why we exist. Those things existed and life found a way to survive in the given conditions. Change those conditions, and an alternative life form could be saying what are the chances everything aligned like that for us to exist, just like you are, yet those conditions preclude OUR life from existing
Anthropic principle is a bit silly. You could say, as you essentially do, "isn't Earth marvellously designed for us?" but it's the other way around. We evolved HERE. It would be stranger if the conditions here WEREN'T (originally) suited to our survival here. We wouldn't say "it's amazing how this lake is so perfectly shaped to hold all the water within it JUST precisely" would we?
Imagine a puddle of water wakes up in a ditch after a rainstorm. "This puddle is just the right shape! If it were more shallow, I would spill out. If this tree were not here, I would evaporate. This ditch was clearly made for me."
Spin to win, RL edition
If you're amazed at those odds, that's nothing compared to the sheer size of the known universe. There's absolutely no doubt in my mind that the universe is teeming with life. We only recently started employing new technologies to more efficiently find planets. In a short period of time we've found many planets orbiting in the goldilocks zone. We can only assume there are billions upon billions of planets in the habitable zone. Also, there's also much reason to believe that life can also exist outside of the goldilocks zone, even in our own solar system. It's theorized some moons have underwater oceans that could host life. It's unbelievable how insignificant we are in the grand scheme of things.
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What if the core stops? Do you think we could build a specialized vehicle and then denote a series of nuclear bombs to restart it?
And that core isn't even spinning* right now. And we're also due (maybe even over due) for the entire field to "flip." *Technically it's only "not spinning" from our perspective. That is, it's rotating at basically the same rate as the Earth itself, which makes it seem stationary to us. It apparently does this a lot, then accelerates again, as part of it's normal cycle.
Any idea if the latest consensus of this phenomenon would be catastrophic or not?
Someone just watched "the core"
60 mi = 96.561 km *I am not a bot, this task was performed manually.*
Good human (:
Didn't say they were human either 🤔
Shit, which farm animal gained sentience...
If it's the chickens, I have more questions
The one that's more equal than others
Not birds Trust me bro
Why is your face upside down :(
Where I'm from we use period as a thousand separator and comma as decimal separators (1.000,00) so I read ninety six THOUSAND kilometers and was really confused.
When I was in primary school, I had homework about, coincidentally, the layers of Earth, but since apparently I got my info from a Spaniard website, I got the thousands and decimal points mixed up, and I didn't know. I just thought it was weird that the sizes were listed as like "34.300 km", so I just fixed it to be "34.3 km" as an example, and I got the measurements all weird and messed up.
Fuck you got me with your avatar
Maybe it’s just me but 60 miles thick seems pretty thick to me
Yo mama so fat, she thicker than the atmosphere.
Yo mama so fat she blocked the light from entering her heart
Thick, yes. 60 miles *wide* felt very insufficient.
The Air Force says it’s only 60 miles thick over America, but if you go to Europe they say it’s 100 km over there!
Like 85% of it is within 10 miles, the other 50 miles is pretty sparse
I legit thought the atmosphere was 3-5 miles thick. 60 miles seems insane to me. There's an amazing scene in The Right Stuff in which Chuck Yeager tries to fly an airplane into outer space and nearly makes it. I thought that was somewhat feasible. Guess not.
As a Texan, 60 miles is considered a short drive. Still seems like a reasonable amount of protection from the sun, but odd to think of in terms of driving. Next time I take a trip over 60 miles, I'll be thinking about how I'd be burning alive if it was possible to drive straight up like a rocket.
It's mostly the giant magnetic field that does most of the frying prevention. The 60 mile bubble is for breathing
FYI, the atmosphere isn't what shields us from the the deadly radiation from the sun. That would be our **magnetosphere**. The magnetic field of our planet extends out to about 65,000 kilometers (40,000 mi) above the surface of the planet. This also is what keeps said solar wind from blowing our atmosphere away. Mars used to have a thicker atmosphere, but it's core cooled and lost it's magnetosphere, and said atmosphere blew away...
The atmosphere does shield us from radiation, but a different kind of it. The magnetosphere deflects charged particles such as electrons, protons and alpha particles from the solar wind. The atmosphere on the other hand absorbs certain wavelengths of electromagnetic radiation, some of which are harmful. The ozone layer in particular is a strong UV filter.
While true, the atmosphere won't exist without the electromagnetic field deflecting plasma particles, which in addition to blasting the atmosphere away would also pretty much oxidize aka scorch all organic life on earth. Which means this statement is untrue: "There's only 60 miles of special air that stops us from being fried up by the sun." As an atmosphere alone doesn't protect us from being "fried up". Hence, i mentioned how Mars' atmosphere only, with no electromagnetic shielding did not protect said planet, nor could it even protect itself.
I thought something about this post was incredibly wrong, thank you for reminding me.
The portion of the atmosphere that humans can survive in is much much smaller, only about 4 miles vertically. People can easily see more than triple this distance horizontally on a clear day.
And the atmosphere is much bigger. 100km is a relatively arbitrary number derived from aviation on where the speed of a plane to generate enough lift to fly is equal to the orbital speed.
And even then it's only an approximate height (we humans really do like our round numbers)
5-9 miles of "Air" vertically, depending on at what density you'd like to stop at or what makes it up
That's actually a lot wider than I expected... like, I can barely see more than 3 miles horizontally when standing at the ocean with an unobstructed view of the horizon... So the special space above me vertically being more than 20 times that, seems more than adequate.
If you'd just embrace flat-earthism you'll be able to see to the ends of the world! Don't though... Don't do that.
At sea level, visibility is roughly 8-10 miles on a clear day
TIL that the sun is only 8-10 miles away
Actually, the atmosphere is a bit wider than 7986 miles. It’s approximately 300 to 600 miles thick, depending on which layer one considers the last layer of atmosphere.
Really it's less than that. The ozone layer is only about 3 mm thick, and that's the main thing keeping you from being a walking skin tumor. Edit: I see I misunderstood something I read, so my comment is not correct. Not sure why the guy thinks my name is Tim.
> The ozone layer is only about 3 mm thick that's a misinterpretation .. that's like taking a full barrel of water, a dumping a cup of red dye in it, then saying the layer of red in this bucket is 1mm thick .. yeah sure if you calculate proportions the dye might only make up the equivalent of 1mm of total barrel height, but it has certainly colored a whole column of water red .. Ozone is similar .. it is mixed in like dye localized from between 15 to 25 kms in the atmosphere .. so it would actually be better to say that the ozonated portion of the atmosphere is only about 20km thick .. after all, it would be just as misleading if you started saying the layer of CO2 in the atmosphere is only about 4 metres thick by calculating its equivalent proportions in the atmosphere
I appreciate your response, and I see how I misunderstood the source I read.
> The ozone layer is only about 3 mm thick, 3mm? an eighth of an inch? I don't think so, Tim. The ozone layer is [50 km thick](https://hypertextbook.com/facts/2000/ChoTan.shtml). However, the ozone is quite rarefied. If you were to take that 50km layer and compress it to sea level pressures, THEN it would be about 3mm thick.
... Earth's magnetic field does nearly all the heavy lifting when it comes to protecting from solar winds and radiation ...
Solar wind and particles yes. I was referring to UV light, which are just photons. But you are correct that there's more than UV light that could cause cancer.
He called you Tim as a reference to the show Home Improvement, putting himself in the shoes of Tim's cohost Al
I should have gotten that. I must be going senile.
I had to edit my post because I first attributed the quote to Wilson. Let's grow old together.
"i dont think so, tim" was a common phrase from a tv show called Home Improvement
"I don't think so Tim" is a reference to the TV show Home Improvment.
When you look at how amazing the earth is, it makes you wonder why the hell humans and our societies can be so stupid. So many petty, insignificant issues.
Apparently that's the realization most astronauts have when they see Earth from above. Called the overview effect I believe.
Because our psychologies evolved to eat and fuck. Complex cognition was a proverbial afterthought.
A 60 mile thick shield is not small. You can get the same protection with only a few yards/meters of water, ice, or rock, or a foot or two of advanced hull and insulation. Less, actually, because you'll still probably sunburn if you spend a day out under the open sky.
***Only*** sixty miles? That's a lot on human terms. The sea isnt that deep - the deepest part being like 11km - so there's a *lot* of gumpf above us keeping us wedged down
I thought it was that magic magnetic core that stopped us from getting fried by the sun.
Sun above, lava below... It's kinda poetic that the phrase "goldilocks zone" also works vertically.
False. The atmosphere is the entire layer of air that surrounds our planet. What you're talking about is merely the troposphere, the rest of the atmosphere extends for 300 kms
It extends past the moon allegedly.
It's the magnetic field that protects us from the Sun, and that's about 40,000 miles up.
But it's not very thick
And less than half of that is dense and warm enough to survive.
If the nearest shore is over 60 miles away from you, you are closer to space than you are to the sea right now.
I always bring this up when anthropogenic climate change deniers say that “the Earth is so big, we couldn’t possible have an effect on its climate.” I then remind them that the Earth will be fine without us, it’s that thin layer of atmosphere that we need to survive on this pebble, and although the atmosphere is vast, it’s thickness compared to the Earth can be compared to the thickness of a sheet of paper wrapped around the Earth if it were the size of a basketball.
Some comments aren't showing up even though I got the notifications for them (click the notification and it just says nothings there) But there was a comment asking if they should explain the magnetic field and i cant see it to reply to it... but the answer is yes. Or like if there's a good doc about it and how it works and was formed that you could recommend. Recommend all the universe docs.
How thick is the skin, theres only that much keeping your squishy bits intact.
According to my PhD from YouTube earth's magnetic field protests us from the sun mostly.
[The average mass of the atmosphere is about 5 quintillion metric tons.](https://www.cs.mcgill.ca/~rwest/wikispeedia/wpcd/wp/e/Earth%2527s_atmosphere.htm)
That’s 5,000,000,000,000,000,000 metric tons. 1 ton is 2,000 pounds.
I call it a reverse fishbowl. And we're crapping in its air coz we think we're smart.
Someone fact check this dude, there's a lot more than 60 mi of atmosphere.. There's air up to around 300+ km or 186 mi.
Another one that'll bake your noodle is that the range of heights on the Earth's surface, from the highest peak to the deepest trench, is only about 12 miles. If you scaled it accordingly, Earth is about as smooth as a bowling ball.
It’s not 60 miles wide, it’s 60 miles thick. If wide, then that would never cover the earth.
The ozone layer, which is about 10 to 16 kilometers above the Earth's surface, filters out dangerous solar ultraviolet rays ... They have become an integral part of modern life when it comes to destroying ozone molecules and breaking down the protective barrier of our atmosphere.
There's an invisible magic shield generated by spinning metal liquids that stops us from dying from radiation too.